There will be a significant “first” this year at the 60^th anniversary of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.   In partnership with the Festival, my team and I are creating the first-ever programme for CMOs, called the CMO Accelerator.

Our research among CMOs in the past few years has revealed an important insight:  as the Cannes Festival has become a large, multi-faceted global marketing event, CMOs are looking for an “end-of-week” synthesis of the important learning and trends at the Festival.   And they are looking to do that in a private environment where they can discuss the implications with each other.  We have designed a program to do exactly that.

The CMO Accelerator Programme is nearly “sold out,” as we are intentionally keeping it small and intimate.  It is attracting CMOs from all around the globe, in categories ranging from financial services to entertainment to consumer products.

Here is a sneak preview of the just-released working agenda for the Accelerator:  CMO Accelerator Programme Agenda

I can hardly wait for June 20 in Cannes, when the first CMO Accelerator kicks into high gear.   I have high hopes this will become a pillar of Cannes Lions for years to come.

Categories: Business

I am still mentally reeling from the annual week-long TED conclave, which happened February 25-March 1 in Long Beach, California.   The theme of this year’s event was “The Young.  The Wise.  The Undiscovered.”  For the first time, the TED curators combed the world looking for undiscovered voices in places such as Tunis, Shanghai, Nairobi, Rio, and Sydney.

TED, which celebrates its 30^th anniversary next year, is simply one of the richest learning environments on the planet, an environment that business simply is not taking advantage of.   Plenty of leaders watch an occasional TED Talk now and then, but few have a strategy for systematically harvesting and applying the inspiration, ideas and themes coming from those talks.

This year, in partnership with Ronda Carnegie’s team from TED and Laurie Coots from Disruption Works, I helped pilot the Institute@TED.  We brought together leaders from five organizations to help them harness the power of TED.  TED’s mission is to spread—and help activate—big, important ideas.  Most businesses share this goal, albeit in a more commercial way.  We wanted to investigate how to best help businesses activate TED’s amazing curated knowledge, in a more thoughtful and deliberate way.

Here is what I learned this year from TED, including my interactions with other business colleagues at the Institute@TED, which I feel is highly relevant for future-oriented business leaders:

– The fast and powerful results from the right incentives.  We all know this to be true—you get what you measure—you get the behavior you reward.  However, as business leaders, we often get complacent with our incentives.  We don’t constantly innovate on them.  We don’t change them as our business situation changes.  Jennifer Granholm, the former governor of Michigan, talked about the great results from the federal government’s “Race to the Top” funding incentives for states who innovate successfully in education.  She called for the same process to innovate in energy.  Alex Laskey, the founder of Opower, has helped individual customers save $200 million by using social incentives that illustrate how one’s energy use compares to one’s neighbors on utility bills.

– Flourishing by embracing constraints to discover new channels of creativity.  So often at TED the most helpful talks come from unexpected people and places.  My most unexpected inspiration this year came from multimedia artist Phil Hansen.  Phil developed nerve damage in his hand which caused a constant tremor, which prevented him from working in his preferred style:  pointillism.  His commitment to “embrace the shake,” as he calls it, helped him achieve limitless creativity from his supposed limitation.  His limitation, once embraced, made him a far more innovative artist.  Architect Michael Green believes in innovating by embracing constraints.  He believes we can meet worldwide housing demand AND constrain carbon emissions by replacing steel and concrete construction with wood construction, that can even be applied to skyscrapers.

– Passion to create disruptive, positive change by simplifying and deconstructing key issues and challenges.   Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal, and chief designer for SpaceX and Tesla, makes a strong case that space travel can be far more affordable if we can learn to return and land rockets.  That is the problem he and his organization are solving.  Mary Lou Jepsen of Google believes we can better understand brain disease, and brain functions like language learning, if we can massively increase the resolution of brain scans.  That is what she is focusing on.  Researcher Allan Savory studied the desertification of grasslands for decades, to isolate the driving force that is causing one of the world’s greatest ecological disasters.  He is now focused on restoring grazing herds to reverse this desertification.  Innovation doesn’t always come from where you expect it.

– Creating new ways to work, collaborating in new ways.  We have talked about the potential of collaboration for years, and most of us collaborate with a huge variety of people and organizations to achieve our goals.  It was clear at TED that “collaboration is meeting the crowd,” and morphing to respond to new challenges and new business models.  Futurist Stewart Brand believes information wants to be free, and today we all basically have access to the same information.  Stewart models a new form of collaboration as he and an organically forming network of scientists work to “de-extinct” several animals that have disappeared from the planet.  Musician Amanda Palmer has a new collaboration model for her music:  her fans should pay what they think her music is worth.  She raised $1.2 million on Kickstarter for her latest album.

Categories: Business

A few months ago the editors of Fortune asked me to create and share my executive dream team, as part of their annual fall feature on the world’s best business leaders.   My team included people you might expect, like Tim Cook at Apple, Mark Loughridge at IBM, and Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook.  Somewhat less expected was my choice for head of strategy, Zhang Ruimin, the CEO and Chairman of Haier, the Chinese consumer electronics and white goods company.

I recently visited Zhang Ruimin at his corporate headquarters in Qingdao.  I have long admired him for his advanced management thinking, and his simply incredible history of results.  I was eager to meet him to explore his thinking on the right direction for business and management theory and practice.

Haier is one of the great brand stories of the past 28 years.  In 1984, Zhang Ruimin became director of the Qingdao Refrigerator Company, which evolved into the Haier Group.  In the early eighties, Qingdao Refrigerator was in deep debt, made only about 10,000 refrigerators a year, and had deep, systemic quality issues.  In one employee meeting that has now become company lore, Zhang Ruimin took a sledge hammer to 76 refrigerators that did not meet quality standards.

Today, Haier is the largest global refrigerator manufacturer, and has branched into a wide array of white goods.  Their annual sales are roughly $24 billion, with 80,000 employees worldwide, and a reputation for innovation and quality.  Zhang Ruimin has led Haier for nearly 30 years, inspiring this most remarkable brand story.

Here is what I learned from my intimate discussion with Zhang Ruimin:

–The future of organization design will be more self-managed.  Mr. Ruimin is a student of organization theory and design (his first question to me was about P&G’s approach to open innovation), and he has been deeply influenced by Jeremy Rifkin’s “The Third Industrial Revolution.”  We talked about how the internet has affected how we work,  how lateral processes and distributed teams are outperforming hierarchal organizations,  and about the importance of being close to the customer all the time.

Haier is experimenting with small, self-managed, contract-based teams, with no hierarchy and no bosses.  They are inspired by Morning Star, a U.S. tomato-processing company that has been practicing these principles for years.  I loved a quote from Mr. Ruimin during our chat, “It is important to keep twirling the pyramid all the time, because it is more important employees listen to the market and not the boss.”

–The power of tapping into the deeper thoughts and feelings of employees to build your culture.  I have recently written a book, “Grow,” about how higher brand ideals drive growth by engaging and inspiring employees and customers differently.  The ideas in my book resonated with Zhang Ruimin and his leadership (they translated my book into Chinese months before I launched the book in China).  He shared a book with me that Haier employees had created, which brings the Haier culture to life through cartoons and quotes by a variety of employees.  This book, simply called “Haier’s Pictures and Words,” was exclusively created by Chinese employees, but the concept is now spreading to other countries.  Here are a few of my favorite quotes in it:

“Corporate culture is like a pot of strong tea, the more you taste it, the better it tastes, and the aftertaste lingers.”  By Wang Yong

“The nature of innovation is to be creative in breaking something.”  By Xiao Huang

“Brand is upheld by user’s heart.”  By Huang Fei

“If you do not care about the users, the users do not care about you.”  By Yang Honghui

–How storytelling can keep your heritage relevant and motivational.   The Haier heritage center is about as good as it gets.  As a new employee or visitor, you walk through the history of the company as a story, experiencing the remarkable history in a visceral and human way.  At the end of the experience, there is a room for sitting and reflection, so employees can think about the implications of their heritage on them as leaders.

Categories: Business